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Pensacola-based dark comedy sitcom 'Scam County' hoping to produce pilot soon

Jake Newby
Pensacola News Journal
From left, Grant Tyson, Michael Daw and Max Rowe star in the Pensacola-based sitcom "Scam County," which is currently in the pilot stages.

A sitcom shot in Escambia County that's all about Escambia County could make its way to your TV screens in the next couple of years if things go to plan for a Pensacola-based sketch comedy group. 

"Scam County" is a dark comedy about three early 30-something-year-old con artists who never quite got the hang of adulthood. The trio prefers petty crime, grifting and cheating the system to going to work every day.

"Scam County" is the brainchild of two local writers/actors Michael Daw and Grant Tyson and it's currently in the pilot-planning stage. Daw and Tyson are part of the sketch comedy group Kitty Get a Job, the producers of the pilot. 

The show is sort of like what you'd get if you bottled elements of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," "Workaholics" and "Trailer Park Boys," shook up the mixture and dumped it out onto Pensacola Beach or Palafox Street. 

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"There's a progression to it, too, where our characters are kind of thrown into these circumstances and they start having to do things that they didn't expect they'd ever have to do, so it gets progressively darker," said Tyson, who plays Graham Tyson on the show, a dread-locked, marijuana-smoking conspiracy theorist who won big on a scratch-off ticket in his late teens but frivolously ran through the money in a matter of years. 

"Most sitcoms are those 30-minute sitcoms and the characters end up in the same place they started at the beginning of the episode," said Daw, who plays a kind of hipster/hobo hybrid in the show. "It's definitely a comedy sitcom first and foremost, but we're taking that dramatic element and adding it to it." 

From left, Michael Daw, Max Rowe and Grant Tyson star in the Pensacola-based sitcom "Scam County," which is currently in the pilot stages.

Daw, Tyson and co-star Max Rowe joked that they've all been in Pensacola long enough that they've earned the right to poke fun at it. They said experiences growing up in Escambia County inspired their content.

"There's not a lot of shows out there that handle the south in a good way," Daw said. "It's either everyone's a stupid redneck or it's 'Floribama (Shore),' and we talk about throwing s--- at Pensacola but we love it here, this is our home. There are lots of great things about it, but part of any good character in a sitcom is its flaws and not just the things that make it good. 

"As an example, there was a con man that sold the Eiffel Tower twice. We thought it'd be hilarious to sell a Confederate monument or something," Daw said. "There's just so many things going on in the south and so many different types of people here that there's a lot for us to play with." 

Tyson and Daw said they look forward to making fun of different geographical stereotypes for which the south is known, but also taking advantage of the varying backdrops that Pensacola presents. 

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"We're in a very diverse area," said production specialist David Cooke. "We got the beaches, we got the west side of town and the north side of Cantonment where there's more country, so we really have a wide variety of areas in such a small area geographically that we can get onto the show."

A teaser video, which is not light on graphic language, was recently released by Kitty Get A Job along with a Kickstarter to fund the shooting of the pilot. They hope to film the pilot in March or April. The Kickstarter funds editing, props and costumes, food on set and festival entries. 

"As a disclaimer, we're not being reimbursed for the money I'm using to start and we're not making money off the Kickstarter," Daw said. "The end goal here is to have a sitcom pilot that we're happy with, that we can submit to film festivals and TV festivals to try and get it in front of the right people." 

Daw said the process of shopping "Scam County" around after the pilot is released will take about a year. They plan to do a screening — possibly at a local movie theater — later in 2018. 

If the pilot is well received, Daw and Tyson hope they can land a TV deal with a streaming service like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon, or a network like HBO or FX. As long as they can curse freely on TV, they won't be too picky about where "Scam County" is aired.

"There's a lot of different avenues we can hopefully go down," Tyson said. "It's a good time to be able to say f--- on TV." 

The show is 10 years in the making, originally created by Daw, Tyson and the third member of their former comedy troupe, Aubrey Nichols, who died of a heart attack in 2014 at the age of 28. Daw, Tyson and others have on-again, off-again worked on the show, and briefly considered nixing it when their friend passed away. Ultimately, they decided that doing everything in their power to bring the show to life was a great way to commemorate Nichols. 

"For a while we thought, 'How can we do it without him?'" Daw said. "But then we thought, 'Wait, how can we not do it?'" 

As of Wednesday afternoon, the group's Kickstarter is more than halfway to its goal of raising $5,000 for the pilot. 

Jake Newby can be reached at jnewby@pnj.com or 850-435-8538.